


Truth In Their Skin

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Genderqueer Character, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-19 23:29:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13134441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Sif would that Loki wear his own face.





	Truth In Their Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eternal_Love_Song](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eternal_Love_Song/gifts).



> I hope you have a wonderful holiday and end of 2017!

They were young in those days, near to the cusp of their maturities, and fractious as a rule. Of all the tricks Loki liked to play, Sif hated none so much as the stolen face. Ever tricksome he would put on the guise of another and do his best to ape them, or else he’d behave outrageously and laugh to see the consternation sure to follow.

Loki argued: “Surely you, with your tactician’s wit, can see what use it would have in battle.”

As ever she could not tell if he mocked or spoke in earnest. “This isn’t battle; it’s court.”

They were stood together on the balcony overlooking the receiving courtyard, where the noble families gathered in preparation for the feast to precede the wild hunt. Loki rested his elbows behind him on the balcony’s edge and smiled, sweet-eyed and thin-lipped. She was already in a poor mood.

“Court is the bloodiest war to be fought,” he said.

“You look a polecat when you smile like that.”

“And you smell as foul,” he said, then he lifted his chin and sniffed at the air. “Ah, but what’s this? Has the lady Sif washed the dirt of the yard from her hair?”

“Has his majesty the prince scrubbed the salt from his tongue?” she countered, “or will he drip poisons in all our cups?”

He smiled. “Oh, Sif,” said Loki. “Weren’t we once friends?”

She did not turn from him but merely set her chin. “Were a friend to wear another friend’s face and form to play at the flirt, then they would be named an ill friend indeed.” 

At this she spun on her heel, long and plain skirts still about her calves, and made to leave. 

Laughingly, he said, “You must forgive me,” or it was pleadingly that he said it. “Surely you’ve punished me long enough.”

“Wear your truths,” she snapped, “and perhaps I will consider of it.”

“And you think me a liar who cannot truth-tell.”

At the broad, open doorway she looked over her shoulder at him. Her dark hair, worn loose, split across her shoulder, the black ends of her hair tickling at both her back, exposed by the low dress, and the pale rim of breast exposed by the bodice.

She did not miss how he stared at her. Hungry, ever hungry, that was Loki who could not be sated.

“I speak as I think,” said Sif, and she left him there.

The grand hall was set for the feast. The musicians had strung their instruments and shone their horns. A number of neat-dressed women passed, their heads pressed together as they laughed. Sif could not shake the weight of Loki.

*

He had first stolen Sif’s face when they were yet children. This was his first success at the spell. She’d retreated after another drawn out argument with her father to the rooms afforded her as Heimdall’s half-sister, to find she’d no peace there: Sif, coltish and squarely faced, fair hair a-tumble, already reclined on her bed.

“What is this,” Sif had said, startled, and then with immediate certainty she’d shouted, “Prince Loki!”

The Sif on her bed leapt up and laughed, but it wasn’t Sif’s laugh, it was Loki’s laugh.

He’d said, shiningly, “That’s Lady Loki, if you please, and aren’t I handsome?” and he’d made an expression Sif had never made in all her life, with puckered lips and a hand behind the head.

She’d thrown pillows at him and then a gilt paperweight, but in the end she’d admitted the spell impressive. That was before Loki made a habit of dressing in Sif’s skin and walking across the realms, playing at who could say: the merry flirt or the humble wife. 

On Midgard the mortal beings worshipped Sif as demure, doting, docile: her fair hair a cascade of wheat. And so Sif traded her blonde curls for straight black locks, for Loki had stolen the gold of her and given her wheat in trade.

Let Loki be a woman, she did not mind. In the days of their childhood, those strange days of alliance and twinned war, she had fought hard to be allowed the honor of sword and shield, as hard as Loki had fought for the honor of witchcraft, ever reserved for women. 

Perhaps once she had glanced at Loki, dressed in her own skin, and found him at an ease he rarely seemed. As if in this guise, Loki was nearer to the core of self. Was it a guise? Or was it a truth, of a sort? Her heart had beat quickly and she would look away, flushed and also furious, from the familiar lines and curves held at new angles.

*

The feast was well under way. Thor, beaming with pride to be recognized so, had accepted the Allfather’s expected invitation to lead the Wild Hunt. Loki, too, was invited in such a role, but he was nowhere to be found; and then suddenly, there was Loki after all, but Loki as Sif had never seen him. 

A tall woman, taller even than Sif, with the same high cheeks and tapered jaw as Loki, dressed in the banner greens and golds, her hair a black tumble that met with the high-furred collar she sported: she ascended the steps and smiled huntingly at Thor, who looked delighted, and the Allfather, who looked exasperated, and Frigga, who reached to touch three fingers to the back of this woman’s hand in a mother’s gesture no one else might have seen but those, like Sif, who sat at the first table below the throne.

Then this woman, who was Loki, turned that same knife’s edge smile on the whole of the court and said, “I will gladly join the hunt along side my brother, Thor, and we shall see who among the two of us will bring the silver buck down first.”

Some courtier well-deep in his cups was heard to murmur in the shocked silence: “What’s this? A woman cannot ride the hunt…”

Sif set her jaw. The tendon of it ached with the force. She felt at once the prison of her fine dress and the plated jewelry that she wore at the behest of the occasion. 

“Should the prince Loki not ride?” asked Loki, with a hand now at his ample breast. “Am I much changed by form?” He looked inquisitively to his mother and to his father, who was frowning not at Loki but at the man who had spoken.

“And is it not so,” went Loki merrily onward, “that women once led the hunt? Women such as myself and,” said the lady, then with a languid turn of the hand, “the much celebrated Sif, thrice now champion of all Asgard?”

From the table Sif stood, and she did so with her shoulders squared and her bearing fierce as any soldier’s. Quellingly she cast her gaze across the crowd before returning at last to Loki now widely smiling.

“I have never ruled that a woman is not to ride with the hunt,” said the Allfather. 

“But the custom!”

“Is a custom now law?” said Loki.

“Yes, let Sif ride with us at the head tomorrow,” said Thor eagerly, leaning forward in his seat. “Sif! I see you there!”

The Allfather, pained, closed his eye a moment then opened it once more. He was looking directly at Sif. A terrible chill locked her spine. He moved on from her to consider Loki.

“My child’s machinations outstrip my own,” said the Allfather. “Any person who has said that a woman is not to ride with the hunt is to be chastised for a fool. The lady Sif, daughter of the Fourth Sister, may ride at the head alongside Thor and Loki.”

Loki smiled and dipped his head and, with all the delicacy of the professional coquette, sent Sif a long look through her lashes before he rose to sit upon her throne, the Moon Throne at the hand of Frigga.

*

Sif was little surprised to open the door to her bed chamber and there in the darkness find the Lady Loki. Loki had sat in the center at the head of the bed, the pillows cushioned behind him and her feet tucked sweetly beneath her legs. 

“Hello, Sif,” said Loki.

“Why did you do it?”

Loki sighed and untucked his legs. He’d traded the formal feast gown for a layered night dress, a silky concoction utterly unlike the plain linen shirt that Sif wore on the nights too cool to sleep bare. 

“Why must you always hear the truth?”

“Why do you so hate to speak it?”

“I only ever tell the truth,” said Loki. “You just don’t like to hear it.”

“You did it,” said Sif, “to force me to forgive you.”

Loki curled a pretty lip and flapped a bony hand in disgust. “As if I could ever force you to do anything. No,” said Loki, “I suppose if you pressed I’d have to admit I like that you never let me get away with so much as an ill-timed sneeze.”

Sif considered Loki, so comfortably sprawled across Sif’s sheets. She said, approaching the bedside as she spoke, “You did do it for me. At least partly. You’ll say it was an afterthought, but that’s only so I’ll fight with you. Because you like it when I’m chasing after you.”

Lady Loki slithered down the pillows. Her arms stretched above her, knuckles against the elegantly carved headboard. In the dim lighting of Sif’s bedroom, Loki’s eyes shone like greenish marbles: a distracting superficiality that belied the depth that resided there.

“Oh, no,” said Loki, sounding bored, “you’ve caught me. O, Sif, thrice champion of Asgard, I am at mercy.”

“But it wasn’t only for me. You’re too selfish for that,” said Sif, “and you’d never be so obvious about it anyway.”

Loki stilled. Those eyebrows were the same, black and thick. It made for a striking look in that fine, and finely boned, face.

Sif turned from her and began to undress. This proved a laborious process, one she exaggerated easily. So rarely did she wear pretty raiment that the task of feigning ineptitude offered little challenge. 

Predictably, Loki rose from the bed to offer assistance. Sif smiled to herself behind the curtain of her own dark hair. You have ever needed to show your skill, she thought at Loki. 

Loki’s fingers were deft and cool where they brushed at Sif’s baring back. Such peculiar calluses, the consequence of dagger work. Each rasp was a familiar thing. 

The dress dropped, pooling to the floor like a shadow. Loki’s hand dropped and skimmed, just lightly, at the little swell of her left hip.

“Are you a woman?” murmured Sif. She half-turned to her shoulder. Her hair separated them. “Is that why you played in my skin?”

Loki laughed, a dry sort of thing. She gripped Sif’s hip firmly then, and Sif grabbed for his wrist and, bringing the arm up crossways between them, turned so that their breath mingled and her nose was at Loki’s lips and her own naked breasts brushed at the satin of Loki’s cascading nightgown.

“I’m not a woman,” said Loki with that red-lipped mouth. “I’m not a man either. Or I’m both. Or I’m one, or the other.”

“How long?”

“How long have I been myself? Oh, a day or so,” said Loki. 

Sif continued to hold that wrist captive in her grip. With the other hand she ghosted a touch from Loki’s rounded hip to the heavy swell of breast. 

“This is your truth, too,” said Sif, testing. 

Loki’s eyes closed. They said, so softly their lips hardly moved, “When have I ever lied to you?”

“All the time.”

“Aside from that.”

Sif, holding Loki’s right breast in hand and the left wrist in the other hand, leaned in the scant distance to kiss Loki’s mouth. The differences were so small, between kissing Loki as they often presented and kissing Loki like this. The most significant difference thus far was soft and warm in Sif’s right palm.

Loki’s breath stuttered. They tipped their chin back and said, “Ah. I thought so,” for Loki could never let well enough alone.

“I like you just as well when you’ve a cock,” said Sif.

“Of course you do,” said Loki, “I’ve had you swearing on it often enough,” and then Loki fell back on the bed with a gasp as Sif shoved them back. Their legs parted; they sprawled inelegantly. 

Sif clambered on top, knees to either side of that ample chest. She’d given up her prizes for the greater goal, which was to wipe the smugness from Loki’s face and replace it with the awed and half-fearful look that Loki took on when Sif had brought him near to coming.

“Why have you done it?” Sif inquired, as mildly as if they were out for a walk. “Answer or I’ll take my pleasure and give you none.”

Loki took a quivering breath, eyes dilating at the threat. With interest Sif noted this. 

“Ah, Sif,” said Loki, reaching to stroke the back of a finger along the breast-swell, “you’re never more striking than when you’re in a fury,” then flicking the nipple. 

She took her pleasure after all, riding Loki’s face, that wicked liar’s tongue burrowing into her cunt and playing with her clit. The exquisite softness of breasts against her own breasts was a new tactile gift, one quickly dwarfed by the exercise of eating at Loki’s own cunt. Loki was wet, flesh hot, the whole of it new; but Loki moaned all the same and pulled at Sif’s hair and made gasping, furious demands as though each plea was dragged out of their chest. 

“Fingers,” said Loki, “inside me—damn you—I want to know.”

Sif kept her nails short for ease in battle. She was grateful for this as she worked in one finger and then a second, into that tight, clenching space. Loki groaned lowly. A heady thought: that Sif could claim Loki. 

She worked at her own second orgasm as she fucked Loki to a pitch and over it. Loki gasped and gasped and said, “Sif, Sif, that—” and then shouted as Sif pressed her mouth to Loki’s cunt again to wring out an even score.

After all of it, in the sweaty dark they clung together. Loki nuzzled at Sif’s breasts: the old fetish, as Sif said. 

“So you will ride with me on the morrow,” Loki murmured to the flat hardness of Sif’s sternum, nestled in her bosom. 

“Have I not done so?”

“Spurn the invitation, then,” Loki said. “Disparage all my hard work.”

Sif flung a leg over Loki’s hips. 

“I would not do so,” said Sif. “You worked very hard.”

Loki made amused noise and kissed the inside swell of Sif’s left breast then the inside swell of the right. Sif tightened her leg about Loki and cupped Loki’s cheek in her hand and bent to kiss their high brow. 

Lips sweeping at Loki’s skin, she said, “I will ride with you on the morrow.”

Loki’s smile was a triumph hidden between her ribs.


End file.
